His Lonely Melodies
by Coral Acacia
Summary: She reflected, as she sank to the floor outside the classroom, that his lonely melodies were much nicer tonight than the voices that haunted her dreams. Hogwarts Eighth Year. DM/HG.
**Disclaimer:** None of this belongs to me, and all rights go to the Queen, JKR. This is only for entertainment purposes.

 **A/N** **:** Sorry if Draco and Hermione are a little OOC in this (but then again, it _is_ Dramione). Hope you all like it.

* * *

 **His Lonely Melodies**

She hadn't meant to find him.

Hermione had simply been wandering the halls, patrolling as was her Head Girl duty, when she heard the faint notes of a song drifting out of one of the many forsaken classrooms that still called Hogwarts home.

It had been melancholic but not quite sad, a piece more along the lines of regretful which drew her in.

When she peered into the room, wondering whether she should dock house points from whoever was serenading the sleepy halls of Hogwarts, there was only a small circle of light illuminating the room.

What she saw there shocked her to a standstill.

Behind the piano, long fingers moving deftly over the keys, was Draco Malfoy, his blond hair and pointed features softer in the glow of the single lamp. He played without sheet music, his eyes closed and his face only marginally relaxed.

Hermione hadn't seen much of him this year. He had kept to his dormitory outside of classes, and at meals he ate by himself at the end of the Slytherin table. No one wanted to associate with an ex - Death Eater.

As for her, she wasn't sure what to make of him. All of his bravado had disappeared along with his friends, and now he seemed intent on failing his classes and drinking himself into oblivion every time she saw him.

Except for in this moment, that is.

He had a bottle of firewhiskey set on the piano, but as she watched him play, totally oblivious to her presence, he didn't reach for it. He played a roaming melody that was at once hypnotizing and abrasive, and she found that she could not move away, no matter how she feared him finding her out.

She decided in a brief moment of fatigue that it did not matter who was playing the music. As long as he wasn't aware of her, no harm could come of it.

And, she reflected as she sank to the floor outside the classroom, his lonely melodies were much nicer tonight than the voices that haunted her dreams.

. . . .

The next evening, she may have purposefully wandered down the hall where she last heard his music, hoping for the same respite. He wasn't there, though; she could not find his music again until one lazy Saturday morning in November.

She was sitting in the Astronomy tower, textbooks piled in her lap and hair piled on top of her head, when she heard a variation of that melody which could only belong to Malfoy. It had the same softness, the same ease.

When she found the classroom, she stood in the doorway and allowed herself a small smile. Music always reminded her of her mother; when Hermione was younger, the woman used to play the piano every night after putting her little girl to bed.

Merlin, but Hermione missed the way things were back then.

"I don't appreciate lurkers, Granger," came Malfoy's sharp voice suddenly, a sharp contrast to the grace of his melodies.

She started, faltering, and swore softly. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to intrude. I just heard you playing a few weeks ago, and I heard you again just now, and… your songs are really lovely, you know?"

His music stopped, and he looked surprised for a brief moment before his eyes shuttered and he turned his hard stare towards the piano. "I'd appreciate if you would leave," he said quietly.

She remembered then that he had lost both his parents in the war, too.

That, at least, she understood.

And so she granted him this one reprieve, and she left him to his melodies.

. . . .

"You may as well come in," he said to her one night in December, and she flushed at being caught but stepped in anyway.

"I'll be quiet," she promised.

He arched an eyebrow at her but said nothing else before turning back to his songs, fingers deft across the keys, and she wondered when Draco Malfoy had grown from a child into a man and learned to hold his tongue.

Perhaps the war really had changed them all.

When her fingers brushed her scar, that one word that would always be with her, she felt the tremors race through her hands, as had begun to happen since that fateful day at Malfoy Manor. Over the summer she had gone, alone, to see a Healer about it, but they had only confirmed her worst fears: the cursed blades had done permanent damage.

Some days her hands shook so badly that she could hardly grip a pen between her fingers.

She let the music carry her gently away from those thoughts, though, and back to a time when her mother knew her name and her father took her ice skating. She let the tears fall silently, hidden behind her hands, and soon sleep had snuck up on her weary bones.

When she awoke alone on the cold classroom floor the next morning, an unfamiliar cloak was balled up under her head.

. . . .

"Is there a reason you can't seem to leave me the hell alone, Granger?" Malfoy snapped at her one day, when she was yet again lurking in the doorway of his classroom, watching him mold the voice of the piano to his will.

She stepped back, still surprised after all these years at the ferocity in his tone. The past few months had shown her a softer side of Draco Malfoy, and it was jarring to realize that he was still very much himself.

War could only change so much.

"Like I said," she told him after some deliberation. "You play beautifully."

"And you weren't invited."

"It reminds me of my mother, if you really must know," she snapped back, annoyed at his expression of indifference. His mouth set into a thin line at her words, because of course he knew what had happened.

Everyone knew that Hermione Granger, war heroine, had been unable to reverse the memory spell she set on her parents to keep them safe.

Everyone knew that they spent their days and nights locked away in St. Mungo's.

Everyone knew, and that included Malfoy.

"I'm sorry for your loss," he ground out after a few painful moments in which she wasn't sure if he was going to hex her or ignore her. This reaction, however, surprised her most.

"Why?" she asked. "Wasn't she just another good-for-nothing Muggle?"

His glare sharpened to a razor's blade. "If you would be so kind so as to not presume that you know what I believe," he said in a low tone, standing from the piano bench to face her, "that would be lovely."

"You expect me to believe that after everything you did during the war -"

"Don't talk to me about the war!" he roared, nearing her so that there was less than a foot between them. "I did what I had to do to protect my family, damn my personal beliefs to hell, and in the end I still failed! So do not. Talk. To me. About. The war."

Hermione watched him seethe angrily, and regret crossed her features briefly. "I'm sorry for your loss, too, Malfoy."

He walked back to his piano and began to sip from his ever-present bottle of firewhiskey. "Get out."

She did.

But the music still followed her, wrapping around her ankles and crawling into her mind, and when she slept she no longer dreamed of death - she dreamed of the music, and she felt a little lighter.

. . . .

She found the room empty one night deep in the heart of January, and so she lit a lamp and sat at the piano bench, flexing her shaky fingers.

A scale came first, tripping and stumbling from her fingertips as they wavered over the keys. Even before the war, Hermione had never been as good as her mother.

She played the scale several times over until her hands were used to the motion, and when she glanced over her shoulder, she was something less than surprised to find Malfoy standing there, hands deep in the pockets of his pants and shirtsleeves rolled up casually.

"That's my piano," he said, tone deceptively calm.

Hermione, however, was not in the mood to be pushed around. "No, it's Hogwarts'. Anyone is allowed to use it."

"Bloody Gryffindors and all your rules," he muttered as he walked over. "Shove off."

"No, thank you."

"Fine."

Neither willing to give in to the other, they sat side by side on the bench until Malfoy began to play, fingers moving up and down the keys in a rhythmic fashion that captivated her eyes completely.

"Merlin's grave, Granger," he said, banging the keys in surprise as she bumped his shoulder, her eyes still trained intently on his hands. "Why the bloody hell do you keep staring at my hands?"

She bit her lip, knowing he would tease her mercilessly if she was honest with him.

"You want to learn, don't you?" he realized a few moments later.

She shrugged, cheeks coloring with embarrassment. "It doesn't matter anyway. I can't." She lifted her hands, which even now were trembling slightly, to show him.

"That's bull, Granger," he said fiercely, posture stiff with the knowledge and memory of how, exactly, her wounds had come to be. "Of course you can play." Before she could protest he had _accio_ ed a few slips of music from somewhere within the castle and set them to rest in front of her.

And then, he taught her how to play.

. . . .

"How did you learn how to play a muggle instrument, Malfoy?" she asked him one night as he played. She had woken almost an hour earlier, drawn out of sleep by a particularly awful nightmare, and her hands were still shaking far too badly to play.

He sighed and took his hands off the keys, halting his haunting melody to answer her question. "I snuck into Muggle London with Blaise a few years ago as a joke. Sometimes I wish I hadn't." When his eyes met hers, she could see that they were troubled, far away.

"I heard someone playing the piano in a bar, and I just… I could not get it out of my head. This piano…" He ran his hand along the burnished wood, protected against the erosion of age by countless spells. "It destroyed everything I once believed," he admitted at last.

Hermione sank down next to him as his shoulders slumped, and she thought about all of the things he had done - and all of the things he hadn't. She thought about second chances, and how if it weren't for them she would not be friends with Harry and Ron, or excelling in her classes, or even a student at Hogwarts.

"Do you blame yourself for what happened during the war?" she asked softly.

Malfoy didn't even have to ask which incident she was referring to. There were so many to choose from. "What do you think, Granger?" he said, his words lacking their usual bite as he buried his face in his hands. "Of course I do. I practically began it."

"You did what you had to do."

"I still had a choice. I could have died, rather than do the things I did."

" _Why_ are you so intent on hating and blaming yourself?"

He turned his face to glare at her. "Why do _you_ even care?"

"Because you need to move on, Malfoy!" she exclaimed. "It's been nearly a year now. We've had our time for grief; now's the time for second chances. For doing things better."

"Is that what you're doing?" His eyes were so hurt and broken as he looked at her, and for a moment she longed for the old days when everything made sense: Malfoy was bad, she was good.

Now, though, she knew that things were never that simple.

They had both done things they regretted, but those things didn't have to define who they were. Hermione clung to that thought as she stared back at him.

"I'm trying, Malfoy. I'm trying."

. . . .

Their final week at Hogwarts found them alone in that forgotten room, Malfoy backing Hermione into the wall until she had nowhere left to run. The piano was long abandoned. "Give me back my firewhiskey," the boy ground out, trying to snatch it out from behind her.

"I think your days of drinking are over, Malfoy," she retorted primly. Today, her hands were hers and hers alone, able to clutch the bottle perfectly well, and his eyes were completely clear as they stared each other down."You play better when you're sober, anyway," she leaned forward to whisper in his ear, so close now that they were almost pressed against each other.

When she drew away slightly, leaving mere inches between them, he muttered, "You minx."

She smirked, then, in a way that was entirely too Slytherin for a Gryffindor, and he saw no other option but to kiss her.

The bottle fell to the floor with a crash and broke into a million shining pieces as they came together, the last tangible remnants of their grief released, but not forgotten.

Never forgotten.

. . . .

The last song he played on that old piano was a waltz, for Hermione's ears alone as the sun rose on their last day at the school they had called home for more than seven years.

As he drew the song to a close, she watched the peace that settled over his face, and she reveled quietly in the fact that his melodies were now just a little less lonely.

. . . .

At their wedding, Draco and Hermione played a duet - and her hands did not falter once.


End file.
